Capitalism, Built to Last
in the tens of thousands of years of humankind, we are blessed to be enjoying the greatest way ever to spawn wealth and happiness: entrepreneurial capitalism. Given our feckless government, perhaps it’s the only way right now. But it’s not a constant—to keep this system healthy, we must continually nurture it. At the moment, too many Americans doubt whether capitalism delivers what they need, in part because too many companies have stopped listening to America.
That’s where the Just 100 comes in. Last year, we debuted the first-ever ranking of companies based on whether they achieve what Americans expect from them. This year, we’ve taken the next step: a unified ranking of 877 of the 1,000 largest publicly traded companies, the best of which, regardless of industry, earn the Just 100 label. The multimillion-dollar research and methodology driving this are unprecedented. We surveyed more than 72,000 people to establish a truly representative look at what Americans want from a just company and then used seven weighted drivers designed to precisely reflect those wants, built with data so granular that it measures store-by-store metrics relative to the zip code.
Forbes publishes the Just 100 in partnership with Just Capital, a nonprofit company started by hedge fund billionaire and Robin Hood Foundation founder Paul Tudor Jones, one of the keenest capitalists. For him, the Just 100 was born of patriotic duty. “There is no bigger threat to our democracy than wealth disparity. It is a story normally reserved for monarchies, dictatorships and plutocracies,” Jones tells me. “And yet we got in this pickle because over the past 40 years the corporate focus on profits took on manic proportions relative to other stakeholders such as employees, communities and the planet.
“Giving the public a voice and providing transparency, as Just Capital is, can start to address this imbalance by using a market mechanism to drive positive change in the most efficient way possible. Let’s hope we aren’t too late.”